Another Pushpin was born in Spring 2009. I knew I was going to be studying abroad in Summer 2009 and wanted to blog about my trip so that family and friends could follow me.

I’ve always documented my trips in one fashion or another (generally by writing painfully detailed journals), but I’d never actually sent my trip diaries to people as the trip progressed, instead electing to just wait until the end. This meant that 1) most people never read the entire thing, and 2) I generally never finished a complete trip diary and/or got really behind midway through because I had no incentive to actually finish the entries in a timely fashion.

The idea of blogging about my trip, however, came after I stumbled across Brook Silva-Braga‘s documentary A Map for Saturday on television sometime in Spring 2009. I caught only the last portion of the film, but was so touched by what I saw that I immediately ordered the DVD. If you’ve never seen the film, I highly recommend it, but that’s not really the point of mentioning it here. What the film did for me was introduce me into the wide world of travel blogging.

I read Brook’s blog, Fifty Weeks, in an afternoon. Then I stumbled across Lee & Sachi’s blog, The World is Not Flat, which I read in the same afternoon. The days following were filled with new travel blogs as I linked and googled my way across the e-world of travel blogs.

I was immediately hooked. I’d designed websites in the past, maintained them fairly regularly. I’d even thrown together a blog or two. I could do this. I could blog about my trip to Europe in Summer 2009 and eventually blog about my own round-the-world trip (the idea for that trip was born at the same time).

The Name
I had a bit of trouble deciding on a name. I wavered between a number of options (April In The World, Making My Journey, Peregrination, April Travels, Encompassing, and Another Pushpin). Eventually, I settled on Another Pushpin. It just seemed to perfectly capture what this blog would be about. It was about more than simply a place to publish my trip diaries or photos. It was about documenting my travel journey – my “quest to see the world, one pushpin at a time.”

The History
I purchased the domain in March 2009 and immediately set about creating a blog. I went with WordPress, since I’d used it before and was comfortable with it. The original theme was Neoclassical and pretty basic. It was essentially designed as place to put my trip diaries to begin with. I used it for about the first two weeks I was in Europe, posting detailed summaries of each day. But then, as tends to happen with me, I got behind in posting (even though I was keeping up with my actual journaling) and stopped posting altogether about halfway through my trip.

I revisited the idea of a travel blog in Summer 2010, after stumbling across some new travel blogs who redefined the way I thought about blogging. Instead of just posting trip diary entries, these travelers were blogging *about* travel. They were talking about what it means to travel, how to travel, where to travel, why to travel. I was fascinated by this idea and immediately revisited AnotherPushpin.com to see how I could redesign the site to accommodate travel writing. It was only then that I found out that my site had been taken over by Russian language content.

I still do not know if the site was hacked or if it was simply a WordPress upgrade gone awry. It’s possible it was the latter, as I used DreamHost’s automatic upgrade feature. Regardless – my content was erased and filled with Russian nonsense. It was disheartening to say the least. Luckily, I had the content saved in documents on my computer. Plus, I’d wanted to redesign the site anyway. And that brings us to today.

The Layout
I’m a firm believer in attributing credit for things I use on this site, even if they are public domain or used with permission.

Theme: ArrasHeader: Designed by myself using an historical map of the world from the Library of Congress Map Collection.Font: The handwritten font used throughout the site is Pea Leslie’s Happy Font from KevinAndAmanda.com.Content Ideas: I take a lot of inspiration from other travel writers. When I post something based on, inspired by, or borrowed from another writer, I will always state the author’s name and link to his or her site. Generally, this means something like a post idea or topic, a post series topic, or an additional section of the site. If you believe I have used something of yours as inspiration and have not attributed it to you, please contact me.

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Another Pushpin chronicles past trips and future destinations and tells the story of a girl (April) who wanders the world constantly in her mind and as often as possible in her life.

It is the online home to April's trip diaries, essays on travel, photos, videos, and dreams. It is a celebration of cultures and people, art and heritage, and, most of all, travel.